by Roger G. Best

There’s an old hoax that has been spreading like wildfire though the Twitter hashtag “RIP Johnny Depp” and other such captions.  It’s an easy “snag” that draws people into action.  In this case, the action is to click through to get the scoop on the story.  So, before we go any further, let me make it perfectly clear that Johnny Depp is alive and well.  The rumors of his demise have been  greatly exaggerated!

While it’s true that many of these hashtag links lead to a faked CNN.com article that is actually hosted on anglefire.com. I have to admit that I seriously considered leaving the link to the angelfire.com link out of this article but I decided to link back to it so you could see the way these things start and propagate.  Again, let me say, this is a fake article and it is NOT a CNN article.  It’s original intent is to draw you to the site with a sensational headline and then dupe you into clicking the links on that page for profit purposes. I want to also point out that this bogus article was from 2004.

But this old hoax has taken on new life.  Twitter has become a source of breaking news and people seem to be starved for that latest headline.  This resurrection of the old hoax is used to fuel the motives of spammers and scammers. The fact that Johnny Depp is alive and well will do nothing to hinder these “bad guys” from coming out in force, in fact, it only add fuel to the success of these scams.  Search engines are currently buzzing with people trying to find out the truth (Is Johnny Depp alive, or not). This only gives these “bad guys” an opportunity an opportunity to try to poison the search engine results, and the spammers to jump in with their malicious links to infect the computers of these truth seekers.

Is Johnny Depp dead?  No!  Did he die in a fatal car accident back in 2004?  No!  So, why the buzz?  It’s motivated by profit.  These “bad guys” use the sensational headlines to flood the various forms of social media with links back to pages that will allow them to expose you to their true motives.  In many cases, visiting these links will expose your computer to some very “bad news” variety of malware.  Some suggest that they have found an arbitrary number of infected files on your computer and ask you to click something to remove them.  Clicking anything actually installs more malware on your system and then comes back to tell you that to completely remove all the infections, you’ll have to purchase the full version.  How’s that for a scam?  Others will install keystroke loggers onto your system to capture usernames and passwords used and send those back out to the Internet server for future exploitation.

My best suggestion is to steer clear of these links and the sensational headlines.  Oh, in case you haven’t picked up on it yet:  As of this posting, Johnny Depp is alive!

Tags: Malware, scammers, spammers

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 24th, 2010 at 5:16 pm and is filed under Malware, Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.